You
can find someone out there to champion any Michael Mann film – to tell you that
this one really is Mann’s
masterpiece. Well, every film Mann has made except for The Keep from 1983 that
is. No one likes The Keep. Hell, no one even watches The Keep any more – it has
never even been released on DVD (for the record, iTunes Canada had it for a
rental). For a director as great as Mann, who has only made 11 films, having
one of them unavailable for so long is unthinkable – or so I thought before
watching The Keep. Having now seen it, all I can say is that unless you are a
Mann completest, there really isn’t any reason to watch the film.

Okay,
perhaps that is a little unfair. The score by Tangerine Dream is, like all of
their work, bizarre, mechanical, strange and memorable – none of those terms means
good (per se), but it’s something. And, for the most part, The Keep does look
good (if you watch the film, remember I said “for the most part” when the
presence in the keep takes a physical form). These elements may not immediately
identify the film as a Michael Mann film – but if you squint, it comes close.

The
problem with The Keep is that basically the entire storyline is incoherent.
This is what happens when a fairly new director makes a larger budget film for
a studio, and reportedly delivered a three and a half hour cut of a film that
was probably meant to be a goofy lark of a fantasy film, not a strange,
existential treatise on good and evil, featuring a hero playing by Scott Glenn
with glowing eyes, who rides his motorcycle deep into Romania to stop the evil
force that Nazis have released from its ancient tomb (he can sense this, by the
way, from Greece). The Nazis don’t know what they have done – so they call in a
Jewish doctor (Ian McKellan), who was born in the tiny village by the keep, and
his daughter (Alberta Watson) to help them. There are good Nazis – some who are
sympathetic and don’t much care for this Hitler fellow, and there are bad Nazis
– who show up in town, and immediately shoot a bunch of the villagers because,
well, that’s what bad Nazis do, right? There is a priest in town (Robert
Prosky), but other than yell a lot in the early going, he doesn’t do much.

For
the most part, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Basically, Ian McKellan’s
Jewish doctor makes a deal with the spirit inside The Keep that he will bring a
talisman outside that will allow the spirit to flourish outside of the walls
that it has been imprisoned in for who knows how long. To McKellan, this
doesn’t sound so bad – and he has a point. After all, this spirit or presence
or whatever has, indeed, melted some Nazis, and has given him back his youth
energy that had all but left him. But then, why would the glowing eyed Scott
Glenn – with the great character name of Glaeken – show up to put a stop to it?
(Why Glaeken stops on the way to have a psychedelic sex scene with McKellan’s
daughter is another unanswered question).

You
can see glimpses of what Michael Mann was going for in The Keep. In the score,
in some of the visuals, in the portrait of good and evil, both trapped in the
same cycle, etc. Who knows, maybe if the original three and half hour long cut
ever surfaces, what we will discover is a lost masterpiece (I wouldn’t bet on
either of those things – that it will resurface, or that it would a masterpiece
if it did, but who knows?). But ultimately The Keep is a failure – an ambitious
movie that never comes together to form a cohesive whole. A lumbering movie
that flies off the rails in the last third. Simply put, it’s probably the worst
film Michael Mann will ever make.

About Me

I am an accountant, living in Brantford, ON - and although I am married and have beautiful daughter, I still find time to watch a lot of movies. This blog is mostly reviews of new movies - with other musing thrown in as well.